in another grunge bar—and the bartender’s doggish facethat night we swiped his tips. As we slipped off, freedom in some song drifted out of the bar,

edged through the cars, and signaled to us throughpure joy sung, we were rushing the wrong way.

G.H. Mosson is the author of two books of poetry, Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River, 2007) and Questions of Fire (Plain View, 2009). His poetry has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. Mosson reviews poetry for The Broadkill Review and lives in Maryland.

Reasons to Wake You

by Paige Lewis

To tell you that the wintering cedar waxwingis able to fit through the growing hole in your roof. That the stars seem secure tonight, not one willing to move, willing to risk the cold. That flowers here are lethal and the bees, desperate for sweet, suck shells from candy. That their honey is now blue and thick and useless. That barcodes are used to conceal a fruit's bruises. That the response to May the Lord be with you has been changed to avoid acknowledging the body.

I need to tell you about creatures heaved up from deep ocean valleys to the shallows where their organs burst, unable to take the weight of air.About coming so close to the surface but never breaching. About learning light through the ache of a body's failure. Can I tell you I feel it? Feel the fading, the silk and sweet pine smell of darkness. Can I wake you to say that when I was young I thought the moon came out at midday just for me?

Carlos Andrés Gómez is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Warren Wilson College. Winner of the 2015 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Muzzle, Rattle, The Acentos Review, The Guardian and The Huffington Post. His work has been anthologized in Me No Habla With Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry (Rebel Satori, 2011), Airmail: Women of Letters (Viking Australia, 2015) and CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (MTV, 2012). Gómez appeared in HBO’s Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and Spike Lee’s movie Inside Man. He lives in New York City.

Road Metal

by Timothy McBride

-for my grandmother, Margaret Kelly

“You don’t need that,” she’d tell us when we’d beg

Two cents for bubblegum or licorice.

A bricklayer’s daughter, she’d grown up hard

as cement—never reached 100 pounds,

Lived on potatoes and tea, cut her own hair.

Husband gone, youngest child killed in the street,

She carried a ballpeen hammer up her sleeve

On the daily walks she made us take all over town,

Crossing the river and the canal, circling the miles

Of Eastman Kodak’s smokestacks, through the invisible

Hops-scented cloud of the Genesee Brewery,

Past the burned-out storefronts of the ’67 riots,

Never stopping at the church where the brother

She wouldn’t speak to, a Catholic priest,

Celebrated morning mass. We followed her

Through drain pipes and alleys. We crawled under a gap

She found in the fence beside the KEEP OUT sign

And up onto the tracks of the New York Central Line,

Startled when she unclasped (this once) her change purse

And gave us each three pennies to lay on the polished rail.

When the tank cars and ore jennies had passed,

We sifted through the ballast rock

She said was called “road metal,” excited as prospectors

for the ruined and unspendable glints of warm copper

Lincoln’s face flattened to a smudge

Our first lesson in what our city’s daily freight

Can do to words like “God” and “Trust.”

Timothy McBride is the author of The Manageable Cold (TriQuarterly, 2010). He lives in Cary, NC.

Self-consciousness

by Larisa Svirsky

Sometimes I feel like a monkey kissing my own reflection, chattering along,an honesty about my breath. a humility in my arms;I held my own leg there.

At the circus I would haveplaced it behind my head. Sometimes I ask myselfhow I would like to be remembered. The answer is “carefully.”

Larisa Svirsky is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. This is her second published poem, the first appeared in Voices.